Wednesday Wisdom

Happy Hump day my lovely Lionesses!!

Welcome to the first edition of The Smart Lioness’ Wednesday Wisdom!! You can look forward to posts about the latest Psychological Research I’ve been reading, but in a way that’s super easy to digest and apply to your life!!

Today I’m going to be talking about some of the latest research on SEX! Yup! You read that right! Sex!! Sexuality is such an important topic of discussion today because there is SO much of it in the media and in our society as a whole. We have all heard the phrase, “sex sells” right? Sex DOES sell but we are selling more than we are educating and accepting the facts of sexuality today, especially, as it relates to women!

The University of Oxford did a study on sex and found that sex more often could actually “make you smarter.” This particular study, found that people who have sex MOST OFTEN scored higher on a test of cognitive abilities than the less sexually active group in the study. The people in this study also had “better verbal fluency” — meaning they were able to “name the most words or animals that started with the letter ‘F’ in one minute.” These research participants also did better on visual tests as well.

Over half of the participants (37) said that they have sex weekly, 26 of them reported having sex monthly, and 10 of the participants said that they never have sex.

The researchers of the study were unable to explain WHY these participants were performing better on these tests. “Maybe hormones like dopamine or oxytocin that are released during sex have something to do with it”, was one possibility that was mentioned. In addition, sex more often correlates to a more active life overall, which is connected to better brain functioning.”

However, there were some things to point out about the validity of this study. The study was small with only 73 individuals who participated. So, we can’t say that the study was big enough and included a sample that was representative of the population at large.

Which means we can’t DEFINITELY say that “sex once a week makes you smarter, but it doesn’t hurt!” And at the very least, more frequent sex can give you and your significant other more time to connect, and at the most it might just boost your brain power!”

Source: “Science Just Gave Us Another Reason to Have More Sex,” Kasandra Brabaw; Refinery29